[mobilitic]

that was the reason i was using the music industry as an example, because the bad music is visible 24/7, a bad book was read by me, by john and by somebody else, but it was forgotten after the fact, not visible to all the world around, even if a lot of people bought it and lost money in that transaction. plus before the internet became such a big tool, people found out that a book was bad through word of mouth, not through reviews on forums and such. there were the big reviewers in the media who got their interests and such and made a mediocre book seem very good, and a very good book seem bad if that was asked of them, but the big mass of readers couldn't warn others, 'cause they had no voice. we have a voice now, so it is much better.

i read a lot of books through the years, i found enough with inconsistencies and poor character development (i'm not talking about the grammar or spelling because in the long run that is not relevant in my opinion), i can't think of a specific one right now, because i didn't make a spreadsheet with their failings, but i will try to remember at least one and maybe some of the others who read this discussion will come with examples of their own.

.

I can't believe I won this the other day!

.

[iamnicki]

To me it is still subjective. Spelling and grammar are valid points (though not huge issues with major published releases), but problems with characters is incredibly vague and therefore subjective.

But for appeasement sake, an example from me would be The Great Gatsby. It may pass all your checkmarks of spelling and grammatical correctness, and characterization, but it sucks to me.

I really don't get the hype about Jane Austen either. Haven't read all her works, but I've never been impressed.

[mobilitic]

ok, i remembered something very visible:P

it's about an author i like a lot: jules verne. he was very thorough in his books liking to be accurate when talking about distances, physics or mathematical equations, chemical reactions and such. he was a bit of a scientist. but when his books got translated from french into english they introduced a lot of inconsistencies not taking into account the difference between the metric system and the imperial and us customary units. if you read the version of his books after the translation you would notice a lot of problems and the sad thing is that most of the translations in other languages were made after the english version so the inconsistencies propagated.

so here you have an example of an author who was published before the indies and who was thorough in his books and the problems appeared because of the publishing companies

[LockHood]

Pretty much any indie book has one or all of the faults I mentioned . Grammar is indeed very important in a book ! How can a book convey a story properly if the meaning is distorted ? :O . So here are some of the indie books I remember that has one or all of the faults I mentioned .

Keagan's Chronicles
Hush Hush
Assassin's Curse
Twilight (ok , back when I ws younger and couldn't tell good writing from bad , I thought it was well written )

And hey ! Your example is not valid ! It's just a translation

P.S : I don't like Jane Austen either . Not because it isn't well written . It's just not my kind of story . I found it boring .

[mobilitic]

it is very valid since the problem appeared because of the publishing company, they are the ones that translated it and then should have edited and proofed it, but they didn't so there appeared a lot of inconsistencies because of that.


i don't consider that spelling and grammar are a good reason for using publishing companies because i read books with such problems published by publishing companies so the editing made by them wasn't very good either. i also read books published by indie authors who had almost no such problems.

as i understand it if you have enough resources you can hire an independent editing company for your books, but i think that can't happen in the beginning when you publish your first books because you haven't got the money. in time if you get a following and make enough money it is advisable to hire somebody to do the editing and the problems of grammar and spelling will disappear and then there won't be any excuses that the use of publishing companies is the only solution to solve these problems.

[LockHood]

That's not a fair example We are talking about authors and their writing skills . A publishing company can only hire translators , and even the best of them can make mistakes more often because they interpret something differently than because they're bad .

[mobilitic]

no we weren't talking about authors we were talking about the fact that the publishing companies are the reason that good books get published and bad books don't get published. that is what you were trying to say before and i was saying that that is not true, that the publishing companies aren't making such a big difference. in the past they made some (a very little) difference, but not anymore.

[LockHood]

You still can't site an example that isn't a translation . You found it so difficult to find an example while I could site several indie books . What does that mean

[mobilitic]

it is a good example of the fact that publishing companies don't make a better job than an indie author. and it isn't just a problem of translation is a problem of editing because after the translation the book should have been edited and proofed again

and the fact that i didn't give other examples is exactly what i said before that i didn't make spreadsheets with the problems of the books i read, their name and their author, i found a lot of books with inconsistencies through the years, but i didn't make a list of them, that is the reason i used the music industry as in example where the problems are more visible and obvious

....

[LockHood]

I don't make spreadsheets either . A bad book is just obvious . I can understand if you cannot find any mistake in a book when you don't even mind wrong grammar

But still , it's one vague example from your part against several from me . What does that mean ?

[mobilitic]

i found problems like the age of a character after a number of years being wrong, or the name used not always being the same which wasn't that big of a deal if i liked the book, the ones that i found more disturbing were when in a conversation between two or more characters after a time you couldn't follow which character said what. also there were some books, not many, which had problems with the flow, you read a paragraph and the next one seemed not quite right, sometimes because of the change of third person to first person pov or the use of present or past tense, it wasn't always obvious why, you just felt it when you read it. and these were books written before the internet and the indie authors